Susan Koger: A Proud Passion for Fashion

I don't know that I was a born entrepreneur. I wasn't that girl that was selling lemonade as soon as I could and trying to employ my friends to make an extra buck, but I am absolutely an entrepreneur through and through. That's one thing that I would love to share with you guys, if you could take something away from this. There is no right way to be an entrepreneur. As I've gone through this journey and as I've had the incredible opportunity to meet so many other amazing entrepreneurs, like yes, there are those born entrepreneurs who when you hear their stories, you're like, oh my God, like you basically as soon as you could talk, you were trying to sell something and to start a business. And that's amazing and I really respect that, but you can come to entrepreneurism, you can find your entrepreneurial path in many different ways. And I think that I'm proof of that. So for me, it starts with my passion for fashion and just loving clothes. I mean, I'm not ashamed to admit it. It might sound unintellectual, but I've always liked getting dressed and it's always something that I was drawn to and I was passionate about and I had an eye for. I didn't have a ton of disposable income growing up, So I started shopping at thrift stores and vintage stores, like basically I wanted to be able to stand out and I wanted to be able to buy things that other people wouldn't have. And the intersection of those two things like a little bit of disposable income and wanting to stand out led me to vintage and thrift store shopping. I grew up in South Florida in a suburb near Fort Lauderdale and I was a Florida girl, like I had seen snow once and when I was in high school like I worked really hard, I wanted to not be a Florida girl anymore. I got into Carnegie Mellon, I decided to be a business major because honestly I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do, but I figured like business maybe could lead to fashion. I honestly didn't really know what jobs existed in the fashion industry other than this concept of being a fashion designer and I wasn't sure that I had the artistic skills to be a fashion designer. So I got into Carnegie Mellon, I had to move up to Pittsburgh and experience my first winter ever, which is kind of daunting. Maybe you guys had an opposite experience coming to beautiful, sunny Stanford from a place that was cold and snowy. But for me, I had to buy a whole new wardrobe and I couldn't do that in South Florida, even if I had had the disposable income to be able to go to the mall and buy everything brand new, there isn't winter wear or even like autumn wear in the malls in South Florida in the summertime. And so I started going to thrift stores and looking for winter wear for the first time and I found a lot of amazing stuff. And like I think that was kind of the moment when I sort of started to become an entrepreneur, like that like seed started to grow. I was just like, I can't pass up these beautiful pieces of clothing. I know they're worth so much more than they are kind of marked at just sitting here. Maybe this was like my innate merchant coming out. And I found myself buying stuff even if it didn't fit me. And I would kind of say like, oh, I'll give it to a friend, or I will use the buttons for a craft project, which would never happen, or I'll learn to sew and I'll tailor it to fit me, which also has not happened. I still don't know how to sew. That's okay, but I was bringing all this stuff home like trash bags and trash bags full of it and I started dating this guy around the same time. He was— his name is Eric, he's my husband today, he's my co-founder at ModCloth and he had actually started a web hosting business with two of his friends in high school. I would say he is more of that born entrepreneur, like thinking about running a business from age 4 or whatever, like as soon as he could talk and kind of think about what he wanted to do. So he had this web hosting business, he'd built a few e-commerce sites, like think about it, this is like 2000, 2001, it was sort of like, we're these like young smart kids, like let's help you get on the interwebs, like they would go around to local business owners in the South Florida area and kind of pitch them on like, we'll help you, get— you need a website to like make your small business bigger. And so he had some experience and he was actually the one that suggested that I build a website and sell some of these products that I was finding, this like one-of-a-kind, these one-of-a-kind vintage pieces. And I thought that it sounded like a fun challenge. I mean, quite honestly, I also thought, hey, if I sell some of this stuff, that means that I get to buy more stuff, which sounds really cool. And it's, again, like thinking back to that time, right, like there weren't really any other options. Like eBay was an option, but I wasn't really finding designer goods and I didn't really think I could like build a brand on eBay. It seems like if I was going to do it, I wanted to be able to control the kind of more of the customer experience and more of the shopping experience. And there wasn't Etsy, there wasn't any of these like easy to start up shopping carts. There was no Instagram to sell on. Like, when I think about the entrepreneurs that are starting today, it's like all you really need is a mobile phone and an Instagram account and you can be connected to, you know, you can be a tastemaker to a group of people that kind of look up to you and think that you have good taste.